Len Barton’s intellectual and practical contribution to the sociology of disability and education is highly significant and widely known. The leading scholars in this collection, including his long term collaborators, offer both a celebration and a reassessment of this contribution, addressing the challenge that the social model of disability has presented to dominant medicalised concepts, categories and practices, and their power to define the identity and the lives of others. At the same time the authors build upon some of the key themes that are woven through Len Barton’s work, such as his call for a ‘politics of hope’.

This collection explores a wide range of topics, including:

• difference as a field of political struggle
• the relationship of disability studies, disabled people and their struggle for inclusion
• radical activism: organic intellectuals and the disability movement
• discrimination, exclusion and effective change
• inclusive education
• the ‘politics of hope’, resilience and transformative actions
• universal pedagogy, human rights and citizenship debates.

The Sociology of Disability and Inclusive Education highlights Len Barton’s humane vision of academic work, of the nature of an inclusive and non-discriminatory society, of the role of an education system which addresses the rights, and potential of all participants. It indicates how such a society could be achieved through the principles of social inclusion, human rights, equity and social justice.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the British Journal of Sociology of Education.